RavePublic BooksWhat Are You Going Through portrays varied relationships—a life-defining friendship as well as a number of mundane interactions with loose acquaintances—that collectively provoke readers to examine how we listen to others and how we unburden ourselves in turn. The narrator assisting with her friend’s death presents an extreme test case for how one might help another bear their pain, but on a broader level, Sigrid Nunez is clearly concerned about the possibilities of empathy in our contemporary moment. It is not so much our capacity for empathy that worries her, but rather the cultural norms surrounding disclosure ... Nunez laments that bearing witness to another’s life is no longer understood as the responsibility of a friend, lover, colleague, or teacher, but rather is thought to require professional skill (and thus also compensation) ... What Are You Going Through makes me rethink my responses, problematizing the sanitized cultural forms allocated for intimacy and disclosure and repositioning witness bearing as a public duty. The novel focuses mainly on the narrator’s relationship with the friend who decides to pursue euthanasia with her assistance. It is through this character that the novel stages its most explicit critique of contemporary therapeutic forms, including journaling, psychotherapy, and support groups. Although these forms offer essential spaces for processing, they encourage us to share with others only when appropriate, modifying experience to fit into specific contexts and genres ... What Are You Going Through offers up the possibility that, though some forms of boundary setting offer crucial protections—particularly for women and people of color, who tend to perform a disproportionate share of care work in America—others are a way of reinscribing individualism, cloaked as self-care ... Nunez’s novel worries that overly consoling, navel-gazing self-care creates a form of therapeutic solipsism. Specifically, contemporary therapeutic forms cultivate solipsism by privatizing inner experience, training individuals to deal with their pain through a sort of inward retreat. While mainstream therapeutic settings can offer solace, they also tend to come with a prescribed set of social conventions, which can impel a person to discipline or suppress the very emotions they are attempting to process.
